Tag: Motherhood

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Helpless but not Hopeless

Last week one of my doctors seemed all but despairing over our Little ‘Leven’s precious life.
In two hours, we go back to see what the Lord is doing, knowing that we have no control over the life of our baby.

It feels helpless. I have been floundering back and forth between despair and hope these last five days.
So while I feel helpless and like I’m about to walk myself to the guillotine, I need to not give in to hopelessness.
I need to rely on my faithful God who has lead us through darkness before, has saved us from dire straits in the past, has shown His power in so many ways to us through the years (and particularly in similar situations to this, where lives of our children have been in the scales).
We have seen Him preserve a child we thought unpreservable. But, yes, we have also seen Him take our children into His bosom when we were unaware.

He does all things well. He is not only God of all help, but God of all hope.
I do trust in Him. But sometimes trust looks like closing my eyes, gritting my teeth, clenching my fists, and jumping off a cliff ~ not knowing what will come of the dive.
So as I prepare to trust Him for the cliff-dive that I’m about to take as I step into a doctor’s office again this morning, I seek to meditate not with helplessness or hopelessness, but hoping in Christ alone, on the following verses.

Job11:18
You will be secure, because there is hope;
you will look about you and take your rest in safety.

Psalm 25:2-6
In you I trust, O my God. Do not let me be put to shame, nor let my enemies triumph over me. No one whose hope is in you will ever be put to shame, but they will be put to shame who are treacherous without excuse. Show me your ways, O LORD, teach me your paths; guide me in your truth and teach me, for you are God my Savior, and my hope is in you all day long. Remember, O LORD, your great mercy and love, for they are from of old.

Psalm 39:7
But now, Lord, what do I look for? My hope is in you.

Psalm 42:11
Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.

Psalm 62:5
Find rest, O my soul, in God alone; my hope comes from him.

Psalm 65:5
You answer us with awesome deeds of righteousness, O God our Savior, the hope of all the ends of the earth and of the farthest seas,

Psalm 119:116
Sustain me according to your promise, and I will live; do not let my hopes be dashed.

Isaiah 40:30-31
Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.

Lamentations 3:21-22 
Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail.

 

Please pray with us for the merciful gift of LIFE for this dearly beloved child.

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Little ‘Leven

There is absolutely nothing that you or I can do to guarantee that we will continue to exist.
You aren’t doing anything that makes you be.
We aren’t the Author.
~N.D. Wilson, Death by Living, p72

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Tonight I meditate on this truth, and try to take comfort in it. We got peek at our precious Little ‘Leven today. We saw a gorgeous heartbeat and a completely sweet baby. We don’t know what the future holds for this child, and it is terrifying but I want to rest in the peace of knowing the Author who does all things well… and I want to be thankful that I am not that author.

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Giving them My All

Autumnal delights!!

“…There must be in every centre of humanity one human being upon a larger plan;
one who does not ‘give her best,’
but gives her all.”
~G.K. Chesterton~

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Rejoicing in my toil

Everyone to whom God has given wealth, and possessions, and the power to enjoy them,
and to accept his lot and rejoice in his toil ~ this is the gift of God.
For he will not much remember the days of his life
because God keeps him occupied with joy in his heart.
Ecclesiastes 5:19

“Blessings, like children, are not ethereal and weightless. Sometimes they feel like they come at you like a Kansas hail storm ~ they might leave a welt! But if you accept your lot and rejoice in your toil, God will give you the kind of overwhelming joy that cannot remember the details. Motherhood is hard work. It is repetitive and often times menial. Accept it. Rejoice in it. This is your toil. Right here. Those are their faces. Enjoy them. The days of your life are supposed to be full of things like this. But joy is not giddy. It is not an emotional rush ~ it is what happens when you accept your lot and rejoice in your toil. So rejoice in your children. Look them in the eyes and give thanks. You will not even remember the work of all this planting when the harvest of joy overwhelms you.” (Rachel Jankovic, Loving the Little Years p102)

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It’s Impossible… and Impossibly Wonderful!

“The task of parenting is simply impossible.
Any sane look at what is required of parents by God is completely and utterly overwhelming.
This is why the task must be undertaken
in grace, by grace, through grace, and because of grace.”

~Douglas Wilson, My Life for Yours p. 123~

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Mandatory Jammy Day!

This morning when we awoke to a thickly white, crunchy world (frost, not snow! not yet anyway…) and a chilly house, I decided it would be Mandatory Jammy Day. Incidentally, we have never had a day spent in our pajamas here before. Gabriel didn’t quite know how to handle it! It took a wee bit of convincing, hehe. But every time he asked if he could put clothes on ~ or rather, when he asked if he could “at least put on pants and a shirt; not clothes, just pants and a shirt!” ~ I would offer something else fun and distracting to do. Let’s build a blanket fort! Let’s read books in there with a flashlight! Let’s eat boxed mac and cheese for lunch! Let’s bake a cake and you can use the mixer by yourself! Let’s watch a video and eat the M&Ms out of trail mix!

What a day. 🙂 I did actually get some other things done, but for the most part, it was a day spent just having fun with the boys and loving on them in a creative way we had not done before. Here’s some [humbling] picture proof of our Jammy Day for your pure and utter enjoyment.

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Rainbows and Redemption goes live!

In the fall of 2011 an idea was conceived.
God placed a desire in two hearts, to grow and nurture something that we would keep for a while and then send out into the world to do His work.
There has been waiting, growth, anticipation, expectation, nail-biting, anxiety, and much prayer since then.
Now we are anticipating completion.
We are ready for arrival, for the big reveal.
We don’t know what will happen, we can not see tomorrow…
We don’t know what the Lord’s plan is, and we know that only He is in control…

Sound familiar?

But I’m not talking about a pregnancy. I’m talking about a project.
One of my dear friends and I have had the great joy of coordinating and editing a devotional created for women on the Pregnancy After Loss journey by women on the Pregnancy After Loss journey. And today we are ready and eager to begin sharing it and sending it out to the world to do God’s work.

But why today? Why have we been using Easter weekend as our deadline?

Because no time of the year could possibly be more fitting. Life after death. Redemption. Glorious hope.
The Saturday between Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday is like a picture of the entire PAL journey. Death has happened before, and you are still reeling from it. You have seeds of hope growing within you but you have no idea what tomorrow holds. As my friend and co-conspirator Kristi wrote once in her article Stuck in Saturday:

Saturday begins when the worst pain is behind you, but a throbbing ache has taken its place. When the sun dares to shine, but your world is still dark. When the abuse is in the past, but not the hurt and shame. When you are no longer hemorrhaging, but neither are you healed. When the rest of the world expects you to be “over it”, but you’re not.

Where are you? Have you experienced the darkness of Good Friday? Do you feel stuck in your Saturday, not really sure where God is and why He withheld His hand of protection from your life? We, too, can follow the example of Jesus’ followers.

Rest. Reflect. Retreat from the frenzy of the world. Talk with others. Don’t be afraid to ask God the hard questions. And do all of this with an element that the disciples didn’t have.

Hope.

They didn’t know what Sunday would hold. They weren’t waiting for a miracle. They were just waiting.

But we know that Jesus rose, and just as He did on that first Easter, God longs to move us from Good Friday to Resurrection Day.

When that resurrection comes, it will not erase the past. Easter Sunday did not change the fact that the crucifixion, in all of its ugliness, had happened. His followers would never forget that day. And there was no “getting back to normal” either. They didn’t return to their former lives of following an itinerant teacher and healer around Judea. No, they went forward into their “new normal” characterized by God’s power and presence in a way they had never dreamed possible.

 But first, you have to get through Saturday.

So please, without further ado, come visit our new website Rainbows and Redemption to get a glimpse of what the Lord has been doing. Allow us to journey with you through your Saturday, through your Pregnancy After Loss.
Please contact us to receive your own PDF version of the e-book devotional. This is a free resource to bless our sisters and glorify our Father. And if it particularly encourages you, we would love to have you make a donation to Hannah’s Prayer Ministries as a way to further promote encouragement to others who may be walking this path, now or in the future.

To God be all glory.
Jesus has risen! Death has been conquered! Hope has been restored!

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Thoughts on “grace” ~ a link

“Grace deals with sin purposefully.  It doesn’t make excuses.  It doesn’t ignore, soften, or cast a blind eye.

It approaches the sinner only after resting in grace himself and then he goes to the sinner, or child with a firm hand, but a compassionate heart.”

Click here for the rest of the short post by a former pastor and dear friend of ours, Ben Alexander. We sure miss Ben in our community (he was called away to another church, and we know God is sovereign), and are thankful for the internet as a medium which allows us to continue gleaning of his wisdom.

His thoughts here on grace being persuasive and winsome has been evidenced in our home in our discipline routines. I am so thankful for resources like this which God uses by His grace to pour out grace upon us so that we may then be equipped to shower grace upon grace on the heads of our children.

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Baking Bread with my Big Boy

I know this articleis going around a lot online (at least in the reformed community) right now, and I’ve heard that people are specifically tweeting, facebooking, and blogging this quote from it:

A friend of mine, a homeschool mom, just passed away of cancer. In the week before she died, I asked her if she had any regrets in her life. She told me she wished she had baked less bread – she said if she had it to do over again she would buy bread and spend more time with her children.

But pardon me, if I may: one thing that I will not say on my death bed is that I wish I would have baked less bread. One of the best memories I can give my child(ren) is the gift of cooking & baking alongside me. (Perhaps that was this woman’s downfall? Shoving her kids aside and separating spending time with her children from doing other work? I don’t know, I can’t say, just reading between the lines in this out-of-context quote. And yes, I did read the entire article: and no, I did not very much like it.) Sharing in work and play and joy together. Learning and talking and laughing. Dumping in fluffy flour, making messes, punching down squishy dough, cleaning the messes & washing the dishes together while listening to music, watching the dough rise and being amazed at how it grows, smelling the deliciousness of baking all the way from the backyard where we took a soccer break, slathering on the butter when the bread was still steaming, and biting into the warm & crunchy goodness. So I just want to offer my perspective here. If there is one thing I am attempting to do more in my motherhood, it is include my child(ren) more in “my” world. If I were to die tomorrow, I would be so incredibly thankful that I have taken the time to (among other things) cook and bake from scratch, and include my child(ren) in the process, because it is life-changing and joy-giving for all of us ~ not because it is part of what will sanctify myself or my children, because the method makes no difference, but because it is such a beautiful opportunity to work together, rejoice together, and share together in some of God’s goodness.

I’ve got photo evidence of my big boy’s bread-baking joy for you. Wish you could hear his glee, feel the freshly ground grain in between your fingers, smell the rich bread, and share a crusty loaf with us. It’s like God’s goodness for all of my senses right here, right now. We’re loving it; and Gabriel especially loves his own little miniature round loaves. 🙂